San Francisco architect Richard Gage sees the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s current position on 9-11 as absurd.

San Francisco architect Richard Gage sees the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s current position on 9-11 as an absurd “smoke and mirrors” show that further reveals that NIST never inquired about how the World Trade Center’s twin towers were destroyed on 9/11/01, and that NIST admits to not having any answers on what actually caused the “global collapse.”

NIST’s latest position on the towers is spelled out in a recent letter sent by NIST to Gage, former Underwriter’s Laboratories scientist Kevin Ryan, 9-11 surviving family members Bill Doyle and Bob McIlvaine, former Brigham Young University physicist Steven Jones, and the group Scholars for 9-11 Truth and Justice. The letter was in response to a request by Gage and the others for corrections to NIST’s infamous 10,000-page report on the towers.

NIST denied their requests for changes. The letter states: “We are unable to provide a full explanation of the total collapse. . . .”

NIST stated that it found “no corroborating evidence to suggest that explosives were used to bring down the buildings.” But in the next sentence the letter says: “NIST did not conduct tests for explosive residue and as noted above, such tests would not necessarily have been conclusive.”

Gage, a leading member of the growing group Architects and Engineers for 9-11 Truth, told AFP that NIST, in its response to requests for corrections: “Acknowledges that they don’t have a plausible explanation as to how the buildings could have collapsed at virtually free-fall speed, due to only gravitational forces, crushing tons of structural steel that was designed to resist that load.”

He added: “Those columns had to have been removed a fraction of a second prior to each floor coming down,” which could only be done with explosives in a coordinated demolition, as Gage recently explained in a detailed presentation at New York City’s Cooper Union and at nearby Webster Hall.

He added that it’s amazing that the towers came down “through the path of greatest resistance without tipping over,” and yet NIST spent 10,000 pages in its major report (2005) only covering the events leading up to the collapse.

“NIST stopped its entire 10,000-page analysis at the point of initiation of collapse,” exclaimed Gage, who pointed out that NIST did not calculate the weight of the buildings’ mass versus the resistance that the dozens of floors below the jet impacts would have provided against a potential collapse.

“And it’s a simple calculation,” Gage told AFP. Gage pointed out that NIST doesn’t even attempt to go beyond the point of collapse initiation because they cannot explain the varied evidence of explosives being used at the WTC, including the lateral ejection of massive steel beams that were blown up to 500 feet away from the towers.

Tremendous force would be needed to do that. And Prof. Jones announced in March 2007 that he found the chemical signature of the incendiary thermate in WTC building materials. Ryan, who was fired from his UL job after raising concerns over serious flaws in NIST’s inquiry, has noted in scientific papers and speeches that fireproofed structural steel easily withstands relatively brief jet-fuel fires and neither melts nor collapses in such an environment.

Gage said there are about 100 cases around the world of high-rise steel framed buildings burning much hotter for at least five hours, and indeed up to 18 hours, without collapsing.

Yet the WTC south tower, which was hit by something second, fell first in just 52 minutes. The north tower fell later after burning just 102 minutes. And the south tower was just nicked by the plane.

Gage has been a practicing architect for 20 years and has worked on most types of building construction including numerous fire-proofed steel framed buildings. He became interested in the 9-11 WTC high-rise “collapses” after hearing the startling conclusions of 9-11 researcher David Ray Griffin. (See AFP’s insert this week, page B-4, for a new 9-11 video from Griffin.)

Gage told AFP an appeal is being filed regarding the IST response to the Request for Correction sent to NIST by Gage and other experts.

What became the World Trade Center was initiated in 1960 by a Lower Manhattan association created and chaired by David Rockefeller. The 110-story north and south towers were part of the WTC complex consisting of seven buildings on 16 acres. At 1,368 and 1,362 feet, the north and south towers were the world’s tallest buildings for a short time, snatching the title from the Empire State Building.

The other five WTC complex buildings were constructed throughout the 1970s and ’80s.WTC 7, being the last in 1985, was, of course, the one that fell into its own footprint in the exact manner of a controlled demolition on 9/11/01, but which was never even hit by a plane that day and only suffered relatively minor fires.

While the cataclysmic nature of the twin towers’ destruction and the precise collapse of WTC 7 all point to an organized inside attack on the complex, even more startling is the fact that an intense six-floor fire on the 11th story of the north tower erupted on Feb. 13, 1975 and burned for more than three hours, hot enough to prompt Capt. Harold Kull of NYFD Engine No. 6 to tell The New York Times, “It was like fighting a blowtorch.”

The fire, estimated to exceed 700 degrees Celsius, was hot enough to blow out windows on the 11th floor’s east side, from which flames were seen shooting out. None of the steel trusses was even replaced; at no time could the entire building have collapsed.

As Gage, Prof. Jones and many others interviewed by AFP have noted, Americans are supposed to believe that the heat from burning jet fuel was hot enough to not only weaken structural steel but bring about a “global collapse” of both towers. As noted, the north tower on 9-11 burned for less than two hours, and the other tower was destroyed after burning for less than an hour. There is no solid evidence that the fires exceeded 500 degrees Fahrenheit for any length of time.

So, hot fires not only have failed to bring down other steel-framed, high-rise buildings; fire specifically failed to bring down the north tower itself in 1975. And WTC designers built the towers to withstand the impact of jet airliners comparable in size to commercial jets used today.

The inclusion of this design characteristic was prompted in part by the events of July 28, 1945, when a B-25 bomber flew into the Empire State Building, igniting a high octane jet-fuel fire that killed 14 and caused considerable physical damage, but it didn’t even come close to bringing down the building.

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